


I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby

by tweedymcgee



Series: Symbiosis [2]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Anthropomorphic, Humor, Hypnosis, M/M, Mind Sex, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-08
Updated: 2013-11-08
Packaged: 2017-12-31 20:25:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1036021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tweedymcgee/pseuds/tweedymcgee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The crack-addled, yet canon-compliant sequel to "Symbiosis," in which Season 4's TARDIS has an extra passenger. And he sheds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby

**Author's Note:**

> Every Ten/Donna shipper seems to have a post-"Midnight" And Then They Done Sex fic in them somewhere. Apparently this one's mine.
> 
> Yes, I did steal the title from _Bringing Up Baby_. Here, have some more:
> 
> _Gee, but it's tough to be broke, kid._   
>  _It's not a joke, kid--it's a curse._   
>  _My luck is changing--it's gotten_   
>  _from simply rotten to something worse._   
>  _Who knows someday I will win too_   
>  _I'll begin to reach my prime._   
>  _Now that I see what our end is_   
>  _All I can spend is just my time._
> 
> _I can't give you anything but love, baby._   
>  _That's the only thing I've plenty of, baby._   
>  _Dream a while, scheme a while,_   
>  _You're sure to find_   
>  _Happiness and, I guess,_   
>  _All those things you've always pined for._   
>  _Gee, it's great to see you looking swell, baby._   
>  _Diamond bracelets Woolworth doesn't sell, baby._   
>  _Till that lucky day you know darn well, baby,_   
>  _I can't give you anything but love._

“Oh. My. God.” Donna Noble set her bag down with a whump, and peered through an open doorway at a riot of greenery. “You have a bloody _garden_. In your spaceship.”

“It's more of a _time_  ship...” The Doctor stopped mid-sentence, suddenly alarmed, as he noticed Donna was about to make a more thorough exploration of the garden. He shot an arm out to close the door, letting the stack of bags and hatboxes he was carrying teeter dangerously, and kicked a few straggling vines out of the way with a scuffed trainer. “Noooooooo, no no no no no no no. Don't go in there. Really don't. Horrid thing, haven't weeded it in ages. Let me show you the swimming pool. You'll love it. Two million gallons of Venusian salt water. It's in the library. Least it was.”

He had her at 'swimming pool.' With an excited gasp, Donna hurried down the corridor, and the Doctor followed.

Behind them, the door eased open silently, just a crack. If Donna had looked back, she might've seen something gleaming faintly in the darkness just beyond the garden door: a pair of golden eyes.

But then again, maybe not. The Master was getting very good at not being seen.

\--

The Doctor had lost track of how long he'd been traveling the universe with a half-feline Master occupying his rose garden. (And eating roughly his own weight in small mammals every few weeks – a diet that required furtive stops at Earth-like planets every time the Master got too efficiently lethal, and depopulated the breeding stock.)

The Cheetah virus had proven to be a much more formidable adversary than the Doctor had hoped. Part of the trouble was the Master himself. His genetic code was by now such a hopeless snarl of Trakenite, degenerating Gallifreyan and rapidly-mutating Cheetah DNA that it was impossible to define any sort of natural state to which he ought to be returned.

At first, the Master had consented to be treated, crouching in abject and obvious misery on a cold metal table in the med bay while the Doctor scanned and prodded and plied him with various injections and concoctions. Nothing ever worked, though one batch of a Silurian folk remedy did get the Master preposterously high, and it took several days for his pupils to return to their usual size.

Finally, a day came when the Master decided enough was enough, and refused all further medical interventions. No amount of sternness, wheedling, or offers of mackerel could get him to emerge from the hydrangea bush he'd hidden under. The Doctor had scarcely caught a glimpse of him since.

It was just as well, really. He hadn't told Donna about the Master yet. He'd meant to, at first. But there had been so many other things to explain, and, well, you had to break humans in slowly. Start with _bigger on the inside_ , work up to _dimensionally transcendental entities resonating simultaneously along all points of the space-time continuum_ , maybe one day you'll get around to _there's a psychotic cat in the rose garden, he's sort of my ex_.

The Doctor picked his way through an unkempt thicket of dog-roses, one arm cradling a formidable Roman crossbow. In place of an arrowhead, the shaft was tipped with a wicked-looking dart, armed with a slender vial of chartreuse fluid, and rigged to discharge on contact.

This one was different. This one was _good_. It was a retrovirus, engineered to target cells with Cheetah-specific proteins and convert them into Trakenite enzyme factories, and because it was optimized for the wildly improbable Gallifreyan genome, it worked in up to seven dimensions at once. The theoretical model had behaved just right, even loaded with several very nasty assumptions about the Master's current biochemical makeup; the Doctor was really ( _really_ really) sure he had it this time.

“Maaaaaasterrrrrr,” the Doctor called. “Don't make me come find you.”

There was no doubt about it: The garden was getting bigger. Not only bigger, but wilder too. There was an especially feral look about the far edge that the Doctor did not like at all. The artificial sun shone fierce and hot; the vegetation hummed and rustled with unseen life. The TARDIS had taken a shine to her predatory passenger.

All at once, the Doctor lost what little patience he had. With his free hand, he picked up a stick and bunged it into an innocent clump of thornapple.

“Come on, you son of a schism, I know you're going to be rid of this thing one day. You will be. I know it. I've _seen_ it.” He wiped sweat from his forehead with a sleeve already speckled with tiny burrs. “Let. Me. Help.”

Something a few yards to the Doctor's left made a faint, unnerving sound, like a cough. Or a chuckle. The Doctor's head snapped around.

“Master,” he said, more of a statement than a question.

The sound had come from a denser part of the garden, where there was a narrow winding path between two high-arching masses of vines. With the tip of the crossbow, the Doctor pushed a few hanging tendrils aside, peering further down the dappled path.

Very near to the Doctor's ear, some kind of cicada-like insect began to call, its tuneless sound vibrating soft but piercing through the humid air. It buzzed high and urgent for a moment, then dropped in pitch again – cycling back and forth, not-quite-rhythmically, trilling a monotonous series of diminished fifths that was almost a pattern but not quite.

A breeze played through the undergrowth, stirring the leaves and setting the slender new vines swaying. Only a few narrow rays of light reached the path below. The Doctor watched them dance and flicker with widening eyes, distracted by the singsong _eeeeeeee_ of the unseen creature. The little muscles in his jaw began to relax, and his face took on a fond, distant expression.

Hours later, he came to his senses with a start. An artificial dusk was falling, and he was lying on the ground beneath a crisscrossing welter of honeysuckle vines. Beside him, the crossbow was smashed to pieces, the vial crushed into the dirt.

The Doctor jumped to his feet, hearts pounding, scanning the shrubbery for movement.

“How are you _better_ at that now?” he asked, indignantly pulling a few stray twigs from his hair. Like most of the queries he'd put to the Master lately, the question was basically rhetorical.

\--

For the most part, life on the TARDIS was peaceful, and evidence of the Master's presence on board was mercifully scarce. So much so that when the Doctor awoke from a lovely nap in the library to the sound of the TARDIS's temporal stabilizer alarms blaring, and the peculiar nausea of having one's time-sense distorted, he didn't immediately blame the Master.

“DONNA,” he yelled, running for the console room.

The TARDIS shuddered, rocking back and forth violently. From another corridor, Donna appeared in the console room, stumbling and clutching a padded rail as the floor pitched and heaved. The Doctor was already clinging to the console, grimly mashing buttons and turning dials.

“Look at this,” he said sternly, pointing to a display screen on the console. “Take a good long look.”

“I don't see anything,” said Donna, clinging to a curving coral strut. “It's completely dark.”

“Right,” he said. “Have you ever seen it do that before? No. Want to know why? I'll tell you why. Because when it does that, it means you're doing something incredibly dangerous.” The TARDIS gave another nauseating lurch.

“Where are we?” Donna said, stubbornly refusing to panic.

“Nowhere,” the Doctor said, yanking a lever, evening out the yaw and pitch of the TARDIS floor a little. “We're in i-space. The TARDIS is trying to navigate to a set of coordinates that doesn't exist in this timeline.”

“Why?”

“You tell me,” he snapped. “When did you start trying to fly on your own?”

“Excuse me?” said Donna, now more offended than frightened.

The Doctor seized a crank with both hands and began energetically winding it. “I let you run one dematerialization sequence and you think you're a Time Lord. Donna, you cannot fly the TARDIS without me.” Something beneath the console gave a resounding clang, and the TARDIS stopped moving. The screen flickered back to glowing, whirling life.

“I wasn't flying.”

“You had to be.”

“I wasn't!”

“It had to be you. Or me, and I know it wasn't me. The isomorphic control system's on. It's completely impossible it wasn't you.”

“I don't even know what an isowhatsit _is_ ,” said Donna.

“What did you do? Tell me what you did.” He loomed over her, grim and furious.

“For the last time. I Did Not. Touch. Your flipping time machine.” Donna met his eyes and stood her ground.

The Doctor glared at her for a moment, then looked away with a small, defeated sigh. He knelt down on the grating and pried a panel loose from the console. A dead rabbit fell out of it, and Donna let out a small scream.

The Doctor regarded the rabbit, and the blinking machinery behind the panel, with profound dismay.

“Ohhhhhhhh, no, no, no, no, NO,” he said, glaring at the rabbit as furiously as he'd been at Donna just a moment before, and pulling fistfuls of wires from the panel.

“What the _hell?_ ” Donna said.

“It's a rabbit,” said the Doctor, with flat distaste, sonicating a glowing mass of fiberoptic cable. He groaned in annoyance, and tried a few different frequencies.

“I know it's a rabbit, dumbo. What's it doing in there?”

“Sending a message,” said the Doctor, examining the ends of a snapped and fraying wire.

“Oh. Really.” Donna packed a paragraph's worth of icy sarcasm into three syllables. “What's it say, then? 'Hello, you've got space rabbits?'”

“It says I need a better isomorphic control system.”

The Doctor picked the rabbit up by the ears, stood up, and stalked out of the console room and down a corridor.

“A 'sorry' would be nice!” Donna shouted after him.

\--

They'd left the TARDIS in high spirits as usual, game for whatever adventure the universe had in store for them today. The Doctor had let Donna out first, then followed himself -- opening the door just the width of his body, squeezing through, and then pulling it shut behind him with a bang. Donna had long ago stopped asking what that was all about.

Hours later, they'd staggered back in undone and bone-weary, with matching haunted expressions.

“Well, that was bloody awful,” said Donna.

“Was it?” said the Doctor, with a wan smile. “I always like libraries. Wonderful places. Full of good things. Like – books. I love books. Don't you love books?”

Donna raised a skeptical eyebrow. The Doctor deflated a little further, leaning forward onto the kitchen table and resting his chin on his folded arms.

“Well, not every day can be the Beatles at Shea Stadium,” he said.

“Which was brilliant as advertised, by the way,” said Donna, patting his elbow. “Cheer up, spaceman. Have a biscuit. I've had three.”

The Doctor let out a mighty sigh.

“Want to talk about it?” said Donna, munching.

“Not really.”

“Big surprise.”

“I know what,” said the Doctor, reaching for a chocolate biscuit, and reviving a little. “Let's go on holiday.”

“Ha,” said Donna. “I thought I _was_ on holiday.”

“No, no. Proper holiday. You know, tourists in funny hats and drinks with ridiculous names and scenic – scenery. And great big massive swimming pools.”

“And cabana boys.”

“Exactly. Cabana boys.”

“You're on, mister.” Donna snorted. “I packed sunscreen, even.”

The corner of the Doctor's mouth twitched in an _I'm-having-a-really-fantastic-idea_ sort of way.

\--

Long after the wheeze and moan of the dematerialization sequence had faded, the Doctor kept staring at the little display screen, where the tiny leisure planet they'd just left behind glowed cold and perfect, an icy blue diamond.

“Doctor.” Donna laid a hand gently on his shoulder.

He looked at her, then quickly away, shaking his head.

“Are you going to be all right?”

“I just need --” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “I think I need to run some tests.”

Donna's forehead creased with worry. “What do you mean, tests?”

“I have to make sure it's gone.”

“It's gone,” she said. “Look at me. _Look at me_ , Doctor. It's gone.”

“It's definitely past human-bedtime. You should go to sleep.”

“Doctor.”

“I'll be fine.” He made a terrible imitation of a smile.

“Like hell you will, Time Twit.”

The Doctor's expression relaxed into something a fraction closer to an actual smile. “Donna,” he said. “I've just got to check for, you know, any lingering delta waveform abnormalities. It won't take long. I'll be in the med bay.”

“Scanning your own brain.”

“Right,” he said.

“Need any help?” Her voice was thick with compassion.

“I'll yell if I do,” he said.

“I'll be up awhile,” she said.

He turned to go, but hesitated at the door of the corridor for a moment. “Donna, you know the big green button next to the dimension throttle? Not the _really_ big green button, the other one. If I start acting weird, just push it, okay?”

“Define 'weird,' Spaceman,” Donna snorted. He tugged on a strand of hair, looking sheepish, and started back down the corridor.

If any foreign influence was still lurking in his unconscious mind, it could be measured and described. However small, however insignificant, it would be a statistical outlier in the swarm of data, it would yield to analysis. He had the instruments.

He had every intention to go to the med bay.

But when the Doctor got to the fork in the corridor, he kept walking, numb and half-conscious of where he was headed. When he got to the doorway of the garden, he stood there a long time, wavering.

At last, some kind of half-formed decision reached, he turned back down the corridor and headed to the kitchen, where Donna was already sitting in silent communion with a pint of ice cream. She looked up expectantly.

The Doctor opened a cupboard, extracted five tins of kippered herring, and opened them one by one onto a plate.

“Changed my mind. I, ah. You know. Midnight snack,” he said, immediately pulling a face when he realized what he'd said.

Donna looked relieved. “Great minds think alike,” she said. “Not that yours looks very appetizing.”

“Just the thing for a nasty shock, fish. Full of omega-threes. I think I'll just, er. Go eat this. Somewhere, ah, quiet. By myself. You know. Long day and all.”

“You sure you're all right?”

“I'm sure.” The Doctor shifted from foot to foot, looking twitchy.

Donna gave him a long hard look. “All right, off you go, then.”

The Doctor nodded, and turned to go.

“It wasn't your fault, you know,” she shouted after him as he padded down the corridor. The Doctor pretended not to hear.

The garden was dark, and wild, and heady with the scent of blooming jasmine. Which the Doctor was now spoiling a bit with the herring.

“Maaaaaaaster,” he shouted. He was being dramatic, and he knew it, and so he resolved to act quickly, before he had a chance for reasonable second thoughts.

“Please. Please, Master.” he called, and laughed a sharp bitter laugh. “Master, please, I need to talk to you.”

The Doctor looked around, straining to see in the dark. His eyes scanned, double-scanned, and triple-scanned every tree, every shrub, for signs of movement.

Without warning, a shape he'd taken for a tall clump of vegetation suddenly came into focus before his eyes, its outline resolving into the shape of a vaguely feline head against the dim sky. The Master took a step forward – he'd been near, so near, all this time – and the Doctor caught his breath.

The Master was still clad in a few rags and tatters of what remained of his clothing, and the Doctor could just make out what looked like a necklace of bones and bits of stray TARDIS machinery around his neck. In the swallowing darkness, he looked almost like a Time Lord still – a strange, feral one, but standing tall and upright, with an air of intelligence.

“I brought you something. Are you hungry? You must be hungry.” The Doctor set the plate down on a convenient sundial.

The Master turned his head and cast a brief glance at the herring, making it wordlessly clear that they were beneath his dignity.

“Master,” the Doctor said, extending his hands palms-up in a beseeching gesture. That was what you were supposed to do with animals; it showed you meant them no harm.

The Master tilted his head, listening. He was close enough that the Doctor could have reached out and touched him, closer than he'd come to the Doctor in a very long time.

“I want to let you go,” the Doctor said quietly.

The Master stood stock-still and silent. If he'd understood, it didn't register in his body language. Perhaps he'd lost all powers of language by now, the Doctor thought. It was only a matter of time.

The Doctor began again, stammering a little. “I thought I could help, but I was wrong. I can't help you, I can't help anyone, I can't, I don't --” He stopped, and took a deep breath. “Master, tell me where you want to go, if you can, and I'll try to take you there. And – if not – there's this great planet. Sun-drenched vistas of blue grass, soaring columns of red rock. Six-legged antelope. It's brilliant, you'd love it.”

He waited a long moment, but the Master didn't move, didn't speak, didn't let on that the sounds coming out of the Doctor's mouth meant anything. The Doctor took another step forward. “Master, I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. For – for everything.”

The Master bowed his head silently, his shoulders shaking. It took the Doctor a moment to realize he was laughing.

“Oh, Doctorrrr,” the Master said, thickly, the vowels coming out all wrong. “You're no fun at all.” He leaned closer to the Doctor, lip curled to reveal several formidable teeth.

The Doctor's face lit up in a beatific, thrilled, perfectly terrified smile. “Oh, you can – you're still – Master, wait –”

The Master advanced on the Doctor, crouching down as he moved forward, eyes widening. “I think you should...” He lowered his head, nostrils flaring. “...Run.”

The Doctor backed away from him, slowly, hearts pounding.

“I said, RUN!” the Master growled, and the Doctor ran. Half-blind, he careened through flowerbeds and thickets and on into a copse of crooked trees, helplessly aware that he was running in the wrong direction from the relative safety of the door. As he ran, the trees bending over him began to writhe, taking on distorted, hallucinogenic shapes, twisting and reaching for him. By Gallifreyan standards of the hypnotic art, a cheap parlor trick -- but in the dark, among all these organic fractal forms, a rather effective one. It occurred to the Doctor that the Master's night vision had probably gotten a significant upgrade since the last time he'd found himself running for his life from his oldest enemy.

The Doctor's shoe caught on the root of a tree, and he lost his footing for an instant. Just long enough to close the distance between them. Within seconds, the Master was upon him, knocking the breath out of him with the force of the impact, and bore the Doctor to the ground, claws sinking into his shoulders.

Sharp teeth seized the back of the Doctor's neck, and a silken voice – more fluid and familiar than the Master's physical voice – sounded in his mind.

 _Didn't get very far, did you?_ The Master chuckled. _My dear, stupid Doctor. If I wanted to leave, I'd be gone by now._ The air between them shimmered and vibrated with the Master's amusement.

The Doctor squeezed his eyes shut, gasping, and he wondered – not for the first time – if the Master was about to snap his neck.

_And if I wanted to kill you, you'd be dead._

The Doctor's fists clenched around a few tufts of grass. The muscles in his shoulders screamed in protest at the Master's weight, and his claws. With the horror of possession on Midnight still ebbing from the Doctor's mind, the distraction of simple physical pain was a pure relief.

“What do you want, then?” the Doctor said, between gritted teeth.

The Master lowered his head and coughed, a high, bone-chilling sound. A rough tongue rasped the Doctor's temple, working its way down with quick, hard strokes along his hairline and under his jaw. The Master's clawed hand clenched and unclenched on his shoulder, a rhythmic, involuntary motion.

The Doctor struggled and pressed up against the Master's weight, not out of any real hope of escape, but just because the act of resistance felt good. He hadn't been able to fight back, on Midnight – couldn't so much as twitch a muscle in his own defense, as the entity took first his voice, then his body, and began to worm cold tendrils of alien intention into his mind.

Now he pushed against the Master with all his strength. It felt like freedom, even with his chest pinned immovably under the Master's weight, and his cheek mashed painfully against the rocky ground. The Master bore down on him harder, with effortless and implacable strength.

With the Doctor neatly immobilized, the Master worked one hand under the Doctor's shirt and pushed it up, exposing the pale expanse of his lower back, then flexed his claws, five bright points against the Doctor's skin. The Doctor held his breath as the Master's claws pierced and dragged, doggedly refusing to cry out at the pain. But then the Master nosed at the Doctor's back, lapping roughly at the scratches he'd left, soothing the sting, and the Doctor let out a low, involuntary moan at the sudden unexpected tenderness of it. It drew an answering growl from the Master, who clawed at him again, harder this time.

The Doctor struggled for breath, helpless to stem a dark tide of arousal that was rolling through his body, unsure if it was his own or just the echo of the Master's. It had been a long time, a terribly long time, since he'd been touched like this – with no gentleness, no hesitation, only a single-minded purpose, calmly inflicting pain and pleasure by turns until in some glorious alchemy they fused into something deep, real, _necessary_. The Doctor squirmed, and the Master rolled him over onto his back with an arm like a steel band.

The Doctor reached up to the shape looming over him, running long, shaking fingers through the fur on the Master's chest. Only one heart beating there; it was the least of what was wrong here, but it gave the Doctor a strange, panicky feeling. He pressed both palms hard against the Master's chest, feeling each heartbeat, knowing the exact moment in time of each without needing to calculate. A hundred and three beats per minute, faster than a human's, slower than a big cat's. He shifted his hips under the Master's weight, and felt the heartbeat speed up.

“Master, let me, let me,” he said, hearing the pleading tone in his own voice and wincing a little at it. He reached both hands to touch the Master's temples, feeling the contact snick into place and settle there. With a satisfied sigh the Master leaned his forehead against the Doctor's, surging forward into the touch, and the Doctor tasted something metallic at the back of his tongue.

“I can – oh. That's. Yes.” On direct contact with the Master's mind, the Doctor arched, tense as a strung wire, his eyelids half-closed in ecstasy.

The Master was focused on him with laser intensity, pouring an utterly familiar torrent of need into the Doctor's mind, obliterating fear and pity, and under that bright flood, the Doctor no longer cared who or what the Master had become.

“ _Koschei_ , god, yes.”

The Master growled, and lowered his head to the Doctor's throat.

\---

The Doctor awoke in the light of morning – or TARDIS-generated-almost-morning – to a fat white peony nodding in his face, and the still form of the Master sprawled out beside him in a flowerbed.

He rolled onto one elbow, taking a good long look at the Master while he was still asleep. Marveling. Memorizing. It had been a long while since he'd seen more than a glimpse of his current form in daylight.

Different as he was, the Master still looked so much like himself – like a pointillist image painted in broad blobs of color, hardly recognizable close up, but clear and familiar at a little distance. The Doctor's gaze followed a swirling pattern of spots down the Master's shoulder to the point of his elbow, where the fur made a little whorl with a tuft, and on down to where the spots ended in a spatter of ink in the fine fur on the Master's muscled forearms.

When he looked up again, the Master was gazing at him through half-closed eyes, lip curled in an expression that, on his old face, would have looked like a lascivious leer. It suited him better now.

“You're beautiful this way,” the Doctor said, gravely.

The Master yawned and stretched luxuriously, arching his back and spreading all his fingers wide.

The Doctor reached out a hand to stroke under the Master's jaw, and was rewarded with a deep, rumbling purr.

“And you've shed all over my best suit. Look at it. Hopeless,” said the Doctor.

The Master only smirked.

\----

Donna had already worked through half of next Sunday's crossword by the time the Doctor appeared in the kitchen, clad in a tattered blue bathrobe and striped pajama bottoms.

“You're looking more chipper this morning.” Donna said.

“Well. Yeah.” The Doctor made a wry, apologetic expression, pulled the collar of his bathrobe a little higher, and ran a hand through his unruly hair.

“Herring do the trick?”

“Oh, yeah. Definitely,” said the Doctor.

“There's tea,” said Donna, smiling into her cup.

“Brilliant,” said the Doctor. “Just the thing, tea.”

It was, too. The Doctor poured himself a cup and eased a little too gingerly into a chair, closing his eyes in deep appreciation of the steam wafting up from the surface of the hot liquid. Donna scribbled something, erased it, and scribbled again.

“'Fast felid.' Seven letters.” Donna bit the end of her pencil and glanced at the Doctor, eyes full of mischief.

“Thyracopraxinus?”

“No way that's seven letters.”

“Depends how you spell it,” the Doctor said, archly.

“Doctor. It's the _Times_.”

“Doubt they can spell in Thyranese, then.” The Doctor got up and headed for the refrigerator.

Donna changed the subject, sort of. “So. He's got a name, has he?”

“Sorry, what?” The Doctor peered into the refrigerator, rummaged around for a container of greenish juice, and took a swig.

“Cat man. Koschei.”

Donna's timing was impeccable. The Doctor spluttered, and a perfect parabolic arc of juice droplets spattered the floor.

Donna rolled her eyes. “Or is that Martian for 'Oooh, do THAT again?'”

The Doctor stood frozen with horror at the direction this conversation was taking – one hand still clutching the juice, the other clenched tightly around the collar of his bathrobe.

“Come on, Time Boy. You've got a talking cat the size of my aunt Alice, you go creeping around the TARDIS with bows and arrows and fish and flipping _rabbits_ , and you expect me not to notice?”

“What?”

“I didn't know you were an _item_ , though. You're worse than I thought, you big space perv.” Donna said, eyes wide in mock-horror.

“ _What?_ ”

“I don't mind, I swear I don't. Just – Doctor?”

The Doctor opened his mouth, and closed it again.

“Next time it's date night, give me some warning, so I won't think the TARDIS is being attacked by sex aliens.”

“Donna,” the Doctor said, weakly.

“I told you, I don't care what kind of alien – things – you get up to, as long as you keep me well out of it.”

“I'm not. He isn't. Rassilon, we weren't _doing_ anything.”

This was technically true, by certain human standards, as long as you didn't count groping, biting, writhing, moaning, and sighing. And eerie, high-pitched wailing sounds - most of which, to be fair, had been the Master.

Donna raised an eyebrow. “Poor _Martha_.”

The Doctor fled the kitchen.

 

\---

  
 **Epilogue: The Reckoning**

  
“He's called the Master.” The Doctor was finding Donna's skepticism on this point slightly disarming. “No, really, he is. It's his name. Like, 'The Doctor.'”

“It's a bit kinky,” said Donna.

“A bit what?”

“So he's not called --”

“No. _No_. That's just, ah, a nickname. From school.”

“School?” Donna's left eyebrow was rising to ever-greater heights of incredulity.

“He was my friend. At the Academy. We were the same year.”

“Doesn't it take a bit longer to get a Ph.D?”

“What?”

“Never mind. You went to school with a cat.”

“He wasn't a cat. He's not really a cat. He's a Time Lord, same as me.”

“So why's he killing things and getting hair all over the furniture?”

“It's a virus, the Cheetah virus. Causes infected hosts to assume feline characteristics.”

Donna's brow furrowed. “You really shouldn't be --”

“It's not spread like that. I don't think.” The Doctor was certain the transmission vector was dependent on chronic exposure to the Cheetah planet itself. Fairly certain. Well, a little bit certain. Possibly he should have looked into that further.

“Hang on a minute. Wasn't somebody else called the Master?” Donna bit her fingernail, thinking.

“Well --”

“Margaret Thatcher?”

“Erm. No.”

“Harold Saxon, that's it. Right?”

“Well – right.” The Doctor scratched his head and adjusted his glasses, looking perturbed.

“How many of them are there?”

“Just one. That's him, too. Same person. He just looks a bit different.”

“Harold _Saxon_.”

“Yeah.”

“The Prime _Minister_.”

“Yeah.”

“You're telling me your giant sex cat is the Prime Minister.”

“He's not my giant sex cat!”

Donna gave him her most devastating Spaceman, You Are Full Of It face.

The Doctor sighed. “All right, he is.”

“But you said he killed all those people.”

“Well – yeah. But not yet, that's in his future. It hasn't happened for him yet.”

“Timey-wimey --”

“– wibbly-wobbly. Right.”

“So, what, one day he's just going to quit being a cat and turn evil and go back in time and take over the world?”

“Well – basically, yes. He, ah, he's a bit evil already.”

“And you're all right with that.”

“Um.”

“He's a Time Lord, what's he got, a cat time machine?”

“No.”

“Is he box trained?”

“Donna.”

“When you do it, is it all TIIIIIIME and SPAAAAAACE?”

“ _Donna_.”

There was a long, awkward silence in the TARDIS.

“I _voted_ for him,” Donna said, finally.

The Doctor grinned. “I know.”


End file.
